EVERSPACE™ 2: Galactic Edition

I went in expecting a pretty space screensaver with combat bolted on. Forty hours later I was min-maxing energy cores and arguing with myself about whether the Interceptor or the Gunship better suited the Ancient Rift endgame. That's the EVERSPACE 2 trap, and it's a good one. At its core this is a third-person arcade space shooter built around the familiar bones of an action RPG. Ship classes function like character classes, each carrying unique active abilities on top of whatever weapons and gear you slot in. The loadout depth is real: you are juggling primary and secondary weapons, energy cores, shields, hull plating, sensors, boosters, and four consumable slots simultaneously. Crafting and trading layer on top of that. It sounds like homework but the feedback loop is tuned well enough that swapping a shield type before a tough encounter feels like problem-solving rather than menu navigation. The handcrafted open world, split across several distinct star systems, is littered with environmental puzzles that use your full six-degrees-of-freedom flight controls cleverly - threading a glowing orb through an asteroid tunnel to unlock a vault never gets old as fast as you would expect. The main campaign runs roughly 30 hours; completionists chasing every side mission and hidden cache can push past 90 hours without hitting a content wall. Combat is the headline act and it earns that billing. Dodging, dashing, and rolling through fighter swarms feels snappy without tipping into the simulation complexity that gates out casual pilots. Capital vessels and ancient guardian encounters force you to think about positioning and weapon-type matchups rather than just holding the trigger. Post-campaign, Ancient Rift runs open up a proper endgame loot chase with legendary gear and escalating enemy waves - it is the closest this game gets to a Diablo-style loop, and it works. The full controller support is genuine; this plays beautifully on a gamepad. Now for the honest part. The story follows clone pilot Adam Roslin trying to escape the Demilitarized Zone of Cluster 34 while factions scheme around him. The premise is solid, the world has flavour, but the characters are mostly flat and the writing plateaus early. Voice acting is uneven - some lines land, others sound like a slightly awkward translation read cold in a booth. Fans of the original EVERSPACE may also feel the sting of losing the roguelike structure entirely; this is a wholly different beast. Zone transitions mean loading screens, and if you are the type who notices those they will start to grate. Encounters can feel repetitive once you have settled into a build, and the faction system lacks the reactivity some players were hoping for - shooting up Coalition ships does not meaningfully shift the world around you. For anyone who ever wanted Freelancer with modern production values and a Diablo loot spine underneath, EVERSPACE 2 is the closest thing that currently exists. The narrative will not reward re-reads the way good RPG writing does, but the combat and customisation depth genuinely hold up past hour 40. It sits at an 81 on Metacritic and 87 percent positive across thousands of Steam reviews, which feels accurate - not a masterwork of storytelling, but a very well-executed game that knows exactly what it wants to be.

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